The School of Essential Ingredients
By Erica Bauermeister
September
means back to school. This year graduate to a new class. Go to The
School of Essential Ingredients and enjoy learning in the company of author
Erica Bauermeister’s heartwarming characters.
Attendance is a treat as you learn lessons from the Monday night cooking classes;
mostly you learn lessons of life and compassion. This artistic triumph will
entice you to slow down your pace and feel life with all your senses.
The cooking
class is held on Monday nights at a restaurant called Lillian’s. It’s an Arts
and Crafts house with front rooms converted into a dining area. This is a very
magical place run by a very special lady named Lillian. For seven years she’s
taught weekly cooking classes on the night the restaurant is closed. The class
is a refuge from the distractions that often prevent people in everyday life to
take time to treasure their life and happiness. There are eight students who
gather for this current series of classes, eight students plus the reader. The
author’s writing is so vivid the reader is drawn right into the midst of the classes,
and the characters’ stories.
Like peeling
the layers of an onion, each character’s history is artistically revealed, the
joys and the hurdles that brought them to their present day. What has shaped
them into the person they are, and what is it that each of them is facing now?
Can a cooking class of strangers shape a future? What are the essential ingredients
to a recipe for the perfect meal, or to the perfect life? Is there such a
thing? As Lillian says with a smile about the essential ingredients, “I might
as well tell you, there isn’t a list and I’ve never had one. Nor do I hand out
recipes. All I can say is that you will learn what you need to.”
Erica
Bauermeister has an extraordinary gift for language and lyrical insights into
human nature. The resulting novel is a magical gift. It‘s the first of her four
novels. According to her website ericabauermeister.com, in
her own words she “wanted to write - books that took what many considered to be
unimportant bits of life and gave them beauty, shone light upon their meaning.”
Her dream has been beautifully shared.
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